Receipt app scoops CeBit PitchFest

By Christine D'Mello

A paper receipt that was hard to read following a purchase at a hardware store spurred Paul Weingarth to go down the digital path.

Weingarth, founded Ping Data along with Spiro Rokos and Mike Boyd. The start-up hopes to tap the 300 billion transactions made annually via its PingReceipt smart product.

Paul Weingarth is the founder of Ping Data and took out the 2018 CEBIT PitchFest.

Ping Data won first place at the 2018 CeBIT Australia PitchFest before judges Adam Cook, investment associate at AirTree Ventures, Bradley Delamare, CEO of Tank Stream Labs, Rohen Sood, investment manager at Reinventure, and Noga Edelstein, co-founder of UrbanYou in Sydney on Thursday.

Ten tech start-ups had four minutes each to pitch their idea followed by a four-minute Q&A session in Shark Tank-style pitches.

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The prize includes, among other things, a fully-paid exhibition stand at next year’s CeBIT, ongoing support and mentorship, altogether valued at $20,000.

Passion for customer experience

Weingarth says his paper receipt from the hardware store was already hard to read “because the printer was running out of ink, and that’s when the cashier told me to take a picture of my receipt with my phone and email it to myself.

“My passion has always been around customer experience, and that didn’t really sit well with me.”

Weingarth looked at this from “the customer lens first and researched a bunch of different solutions in the market around digitisation of receipts and realised that nothing was really customer-centric".

“I started thinking about how we could make the experience completely seamless for customers. So, we link the customer’s receipt to the bank card and automatically send it to their mobile banking app, providing them better transparency when they trying to reconcile spending and so forth.

"[For] users, it’s about making life that little bit easier and maybe making a little bit of money back on your rewards. For banks, it’s about enhancing that cardholder experience and enriching their digital assets. For merchants, it is about understanding more about their customers.”

Weingarth says Ping Data has completed a trial with a tier-one bank partner. “We are now moving into integration stage, so we will have this live by the end of the year. We are also working in parallel with some of the other banks.”

Solving employee underutilisation

Tim Walmsley’s BenchOn, a business-to-business talent mobility platform that matches short-term contract requirement with “hidden talents in Australian companies”, won second place.

“A lot of our industries are becoming much more contract-based," says CEO Walmsley, “and if contracts are cancelled or they get delayed, it creates these gaps where companies have expensive staff sitting on the bench chewing up their cashflow while they wait for their next contract.

“When I was an executive in industry, I saw heaps of people losing their jobs because companies could not afford to keep them in down times and then themselves shutting down because the company ran out of money.

“So we built a business platform that automatically matches staff who are on the bench with short-term contracts with other companies that are in search of them.”

Walmsley says the platform launched about 18 months ago. “We now have about 300 corporate clients and we have processed over $50 million worth of contracts.”

Instant digital books by students

Jenny Atkinson’s Littlescribe, which lets children create original books from their handwritten and drawn pages, took third place at the pitchfest.

“We create purpose for students’ writing,” said Atkinson during her pitch. “And we do that by taking handwriting that is happening in classrooms, which our platform transforms into an instant digital book fit for printing and production.

“We also enable schools to create their own digital library of original books written by their students for their students. And we create toolkits for teachers, and data for stakeholders.”

Atkinson says in term one of this year, Littlescribe connected with 30 schools.

Diverse range of techpreneurs

The other finalists at 2018 CeBIT’s PitchFest ranged from medical to VR to safety to recruitment.

Joss Kesby, inventor and managing director at Diffuse Energy, says its product is a “small wind turbine that’s twice as powerful as our competitors, it will also be quieter and safer”. He says the initial target market is yacht owners.

Inspace XR builds augmented and virtual reality technology for the building sector. Its first product River Fox allows architects to convert their CAD files into virtual reality with a click. “They could be inside a shopping centre or airport before it is constructed,” says CEO Justin Liang.

The "Concussionometer" is HeadsafeIP’s portable, clinically validated technology used in the assessment of concussion. The headset uses the technology to measure the brain’s electrical activity when a person is concussed. Founder Dr Adrian Cohen says the product is still a year from market because “with medical devices you have to go through a very rigorous process of building to an international certification and clinical testing”.

While the device launched in the market as the "Concussionometer", the company is just about to relaunch it with a new name, NuroChek.

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Sourcr is a recruitment platform allowing businesses to find and compare recruiters, while KnowHowHere is an IoT app platform that provides alerts and safety tools for field workers, including the mining and defence sectors.